Drug-related violence along the Mexican border has become so serious that bullets from shootouts among rival smugglers have spilled over into a major U.S. city long ranked among the nation’s safest.

In the last few weeks alone, at least eight bullets have fired into El PasoTexas from the crime-infested narcotics hotbed of Ciudad Juarez, according to a national news report that calls the sprawling Mexican city one of the world’s most dangerous places.

The first bullets struck El PasoCity Hall and the others hit a public university building and closed a major highway in the west Texas municipality with a population of about 625,000. The gun battles are breaking out everywhere, according to El Paso’s CountySheriff, but there isn’t much to be done since local law enforcement officials are legally forbidden from intervening in another country’s war.

This sort of violence is typical in Juarez, which has long been the center of Mexico’s massive drug war. More than 6,000 people have been killed there in the last few years because rival cartels engaged in a war with each other and Mexican authorities for control of smuggling routes into the U.S. Over the years communities on the American side of the border have been largely shielded from the violence but that is quickly changing.

In a letter to President Obama after the El PasoCity Hall shooting, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said his state is under constant assault from illegal activity threatening a porous border. It was “good fortune” that no one was injured in the recent shooting, but “luck and good fortune are not effective border enforcement policies,” Abbott wrote. “The shocking reality of cross-border gunfire proves the cold reality: American lives are at risk.”

This sort of deadly violence has also spread into other parts of the U.S., even as the powerful open borders movement successfully lobbies the Obama Administration to look the other way as it escalates. Just a few months ago signs were posted at national parks near the border, mostly in Arizona, warning visitors of the dangers created by Mexican drug and immigrant smugglers.